This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Dell announces second-quarter earnings. Toshiba releases a new Canvio lineup. Cloudian announces a strong first half of 2020. Diamanti announces GA of Spektra 3.0. GigaSpaces announces InsightEdge version 15.5. Quest Acquires Binary Tree. OWC releases its Mercury Elite Pro Dual with a 3-port hub. AWS announced new AMD EPYC C5a and C5d instances.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Dell announces second-quarter earnings. Toshiba releases a new Canvio lineup. Cloudian announces a strong first half of 2020. Diamanti announces GA of Spektra 3.0. GigaSpaces announces InsightEdge version 15.5. Quest Acquires Binary Tree. OWC releases its Mercury Elite Pro Dual with a 3-port hub. AWS announced new AMD EPYC C5a and C5d instances.
Dell Announces Q2 Earnings
Dell Technologies announced its second-quarter results of 2020. They were able to beat analyst’s expectations for the sixth quarter in a row. Highlights include:
- Second quarter revenue of $22.7 billion, non-GAAP revenue of $22.8 billion
- Operating income up 119% to $1.1 billion, non-GAAP operating income of $2.6 billion
- Diluted earnings per share was $1.37 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.92.
- Cash flow of $3.3 billion
- Deferred revenue of $28.8B, up 14%
- Strength in the government sector and in education, with orders up 16 and 24 percent, respectively
- Recurring revenue, which includes, as-a-Service delivered as part of Dell Technologies on Demand, was approximately $6 billion for the quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year
Toshiba Releases New Canvio Lineup
After not hearing from Toshiba in a while, the company released a refreshed version of its portable drive line, Canvio. The new drive line leverages USB-C and works with Mac, PCs, and gaming consoles. The new lineup and use cases include:
- Canvio Flex – The Canvio Flex portable storage drives feature up to 4TB1 of storage in its most compatible form – offering both USB-C and USB-A cable, that enables users to seamlessly store and access their data on multiple devices including Mac computers, Windows PC, iPad Pro mobile digital devices, and supported tablet devices2 interchangeably with a simple one-stop solution.
- Canvio Gaming – With the Canvio Gaming portable storage drives, users will be able to expand their game library easier than ever with the ability to carry up to 100 games3 (4TB) in a stylish portable case designed for popular gaming consoles and PC game systems2. Canvio Gaming drives feature a firmware-customized “Always-On” mode to support responsive gameplay.
- Canvio Advance – Featuring a unique textured design with new colors, the Canvio Advance portable storage drives help content creators and photographers protect their content on the go. With portable storage, using both auto backup, and data security software, users will be able to take life anywhere.
- Canvio Ready –A storage solution for students and other entry-level users who want simple storage that’s easy to use – now featuring a new two-tone design. This portable storage offers USB plug & play, file drag & drop, and simple storage expansion for PCs.
Cloudian Announces A Strong First Half 2020
Another company announced a good start to fiscal 2020 is Cloudian. The first half of their year saw 50 new customers added bringing the total to 500 worldwide. Other highlights include:
- Introduction of a new Cloudian-Veeam ransomware protection solution that makes backup data copies immutable and, therefore, invulnerable to hacker encryption or deletion.
- Growing adoption of Cloudian Object Storage for VMware Cloud Director, giving VMware Cloud Providers a limitlessly scalable, cost-effective and feature-rich storage foundation for delivering new and enhanced value-add services to their customers.
- Support for cloud-native environments as a scale-out backup target for open-source Kubernetes applications and data (recently expanded with Cloudian’s new Kubernetes support).
- Certification with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), making Cloudian HyperStore the only independent object storage platform in the industry that has obtained both FIPS and Common Criteria (CC) security certifications.
- Integration with Splunk SmartStore, enabling organizations to index and store more data at a lower cost by decoupling compute and storage.
- Expansion into Australia/New Zealand and India.
- Launch of HyperIQ observability and analytics software that provides a unified management view of Cloudian storage and infrastructure plus user behavior insights.
- The breadth of new customer wins, including with a national health agency at the forefront of the COVID pandemic fight, three major universities in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, a top provider of diagnostic imaging solutions, a leading European telecommunications company, a cutting-edge financial services firm and two sovereign cloud services providers.
Diamanti Announces GA of Spektra 3.0
Diamanti has announced their transition to a software-focused company that aims to solve the challenges users encounter with Kubernetes and the ever-expanding adoption of the technology. Along with the above, the company announced the general availability of Diamanti Spektra 3.0 as an enterprise-optimized software platform that enables container-based hybrid clouds.
GigaSpaces Announces InsightEdge Version 15.5
GigaSpaces announced the 15.5 version of its in-memory data and analytics processing platform, InsightEdge. The latest version is all about efficiency and automation. The main benefits include:
- Realizing the value of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments: This version introduces new automated provisioning across cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud. Depending on the type of applications deployed, customers can choose to scale up for transactions (RDBMS) or out for analytics (NoSQL), and simply manage the resources required, either automatically or with a single click, according to the thresholds defined in the system to ensure application performance levels. This process is automatic without any service disruption.
- Perfecting microservices: With one-click microservices deployment and schema evolution support, customers can easily introduce new microservices into production, with no downtime, leveraging Canary, and Blue-Green strategies. The system’s performance and health are continuously monitored, to ensure that no bottlenecks occur, resulting in optimal customer experience.
- Simplified management and operations: Additional no-code one-click connectors are available for more on-premise and cloud RDBMS. This automates the data integration process, by discovering the data structure and the tables with their properties, as well as the indexes, eliminating human errors that can be associated with manual mapping. It reduces integration efforts from weeks to virtually a single click. Index Usage is a new GigaSpaces tool that provides out-of-the-box index usage efficiency metrics to simplify the data modeling process, pinpoint problems, and uncover index optimization opportunities.
Quest Acquires Binary Tree
Quest Software announced that it has acquired the migration company, Binary Tree. Binary Tree is a longtime partner of Microsoft, giving Quest a chance to expand its position with the tech giant. The combined company is said to offer:
- Binary Tree’s core strength in Active Directory and Exchange migration, as well as capabilities in Notes and Domino transformation, strengthening solutions to assist enterprise-level customers.
- Binary Tree’s SaaS-based migration solutions will expand the Quest offering, providing additional features to customers and partners performing tenant migration.
- With both companies having been in existence for nearly three decades and supporting the Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft technologies since their inception, organizations can benefit from the extensive knowledge that can only be learned through experience.
OWC Releases Its Mercury Elite Pro Dual With 3-Port Hub
This new hub from OWC delivers storage, up to 32TB, as well as more ports for modern notebooks that seem to be lacking them. The new hub is available now starting at $250 for the 2TB version. Highlights include:
- Universally compatible: works with any USB-equipped Mac, PC, or mobile device such as iPad Pro, gaming consoles, you name it that supports external storage
- Pro-grade storage with real-world tested1 performance
- Connect and charge: Three USB ports for audio or video mixers, cameras, card readers, tablets, keyboards, mice, anything USB
- Configurable capacity: up to 32TB of high-performance data storage
- Plug and play & ready to go: no drivers needed and includes USB connecting cables
- Optional, user configurable hardware RAID settings for 0, 1, Span, or independent mode operation for advanced users with specific application requirements
- Whisper-quiet: heat-dissipating aluminum with high-efficiency cooling fan
- Easy drive monitoring: front panel activity LEDs offer instant status update
- Quality and Reliability assured: all solutions undergo rigorous multi-step testing and performance certification
- Worry-free: up to 3 Year OWC Limited Warranty with 1 Year Level 1 data recovery and lifetime US-based support
OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual with 3-Port Hub at Macsales
AWS Announced New AMD EPYC C5a & C5d Instances
AMD announced new AWS instances for compute-optimized, C5a and C5d. These new compute instances are all about high-performance with local NVMe storage and high-speed connectivity. The new instances are said to offer up to a 10% cost savings. Use cases include:
- NGINX in high-performance, multi-threaded deployments can deliver significantly lower cost when implemented with C5a.
- MySQL deployment on C5a instances can use a selection of different vCPUs sizes to match business needs and deliver linear scaling of transactional performance.
- Memcached on C5a can improve latency and throughput for many read-heavy, application workloads, including social networking, gaming, media sharing, Q&A portals, and for many database tasks with low latency requirements
